The Love Dream Combat of Design & Technology

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I am impressed with this very smart, outrageous concept, one that only a group like the Wu-Tang Clan could pull off. No matter what happens now, it is done. The statement has been made, the art is born. Your move, world.

They recorded in secret and plan to tour the album in galleries and other places for listening events. Then it gets sold, and the owner can do whatever he or she wants to do with it–sit on it, sell it, distribute it for free, or something possibly even more radical.

“The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years,” says RZA. “And yet it doesn’t receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it’s been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.” Whether or not Wu-Tang Clan is able to find enough people who want to go experience their album in a museum to make an impact remains to be seen — as does the viability of a multi-million dollar unique pressing of that album, but the group is OK with its plan going awry. “It might totally flop, and we might be completely ridiculed,” says co-producer Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh. “But the essence and core of our ideas is to inspire creation and originality and debate, and save the music album from dying.”

Core77 has a short post on The Hoffman Dovetail Key, what appears to be a simple, elegant and compact system for dovetailing wood parts together.

For those not grasping it right away, this system can enable an absolutely radical change in your production system. Consider that items joined with these HD Keys require no glue, no glue-up, no cleaning up the squeeze-out, no clamps, no drying time. Finished pieces can be stacked as soon as they’re together with no worries about glue squeeze-out from one piece marring the one beneath it, obviating the need for racks.

I’ve been saying “biscuit joiner” when people ask me what my favorite tool is (they do ask, I don’t know why). I might have to change my answer now.

I’ve always found mathematics beautiful. And I’ve always, or nearly always, felt that it was taught poorly. Too much time spent trying to get to the answer and almost no appreciation for the poetic magnificence around it. I saw this discussion on StackExchange and fell back in love with math all over again:

Just a little while ago I read about Moebius Noodles, [article in The Atlantic] a book (a movement?) that shares this love of math and honestly, to the core, believes that all children can learn to love math, too. It has to do with how we talk about it.

An excerpt:

“Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture,” she says. They also miss the essential point—that mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than “little manipulations of numbers,” as she puts it. It’s akin to budding filmmakers learning first about costumes, lighting and other technical aspects, rather than about crafting meaningful stories.